I am currently training in relational Integrative Psychotherapy, and this deeply influences the way I view psychotherapy, psychological counselling, life coaching, mental health facilitation, pastoral psycholgy, spiritual guidance, etc. I see the quality of the relationship as the common healing, change-promoting factor beyond the differences that exist between this types of offering help for clients.

The vision I present emphasises is a slice of the change process, not the whole picture. Yet I consciously choose to emphasise this because I see it as an essential element.

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I consider the most fundamental task of any helping relationship to be the development of our emotion regulation at the level of our nervous system. This emotion regulation develops in our infancy and childhood in our relationship with our mother (or primary caregiver). No matter how loving, caring and responsive a mother may be, there will always be some small or large part of this learning process of emotion regulation that does not take place in childhood.

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From this lack, various difficulties, psychological problems and disorders develop facilitated by external life circumstances. This deficiency can be remedied at any stage of life, and often does not even need professional help. Our trusting, loving human relationships have a healing effect on our nervous system by enabling us to practice emotion regulation.

But there are situations in life, and there are deep deficits, where professional help is needed. I think of helping professionals as those who, within the safe and artificial framework of therapy, purposefully create the medium, the space of the therapeutic relationship in which emotion regulation can be practised. 

I distinguish three stages in this process:

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1. the creation of a safe space in which the client can experience being held, being carried, experiencing what is part of his or her inner world. Here, the client does not have to feel ashamed of anything that belongs to his/her external or internal reality.

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2. In this safe space, the client can get in touch with their own inner processes. They can live them in the "here-and-now" in the presence of the helping professional. They can be together with the client's reality. By allowing this reality to emerge, to be given space in a non-judgmental environment, it can slowly begin to change.

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3.The third stage is the stage of understanding. The internal process experienced in a safe environment becomes intelligible at the level of reason. Patterns, strengths and weaknesses are revealed. The possibilities for change and modification. All that can be formulated on the level of cognition is no longer a theoretical discourse, because it has been preceded by experience, the client is in touch with his own experience at the level of his emotions, inner images and body feelings.

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The main impact factor of the process is the helping relationship. The safe space provided by the helping relationship in which change can begin. And the different therapeutic techniques contribute to making experiences accessible in this safe space, to recognising the healthy and wounded parts of the self and to starting a dialogue beetween these parts. 

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In order to do this, in addition to the conversation, the Socratic dialogue, I consider the use of various guided imagination, bodywork, focusing and breathing-, mindfulness- and self-compassion meditation practices to be essential. These techniques allow us to encounter experience on a deeper level than just thoughts. 

They facilitate neural processes that contribute to the practice of emotion regulation.